Archive for the 'War' Category
U.S. Weighing Closer Ties With Hardline Islamists in Syria
December 17th, 2013Via: Foreign Policy: As the moderate faction of the Syrian rebellion implodes under the strain of vicious infighting and diminished resources, the United States is increasingly looking to hardline Islamists in its efforts to gain leverage in Syria’s civil war. The development has alarmed U.S. observers concerned that the radical Salafists do not share U.S. […]
The 6,000-Page Report on CIA Torture Has Now Been Suppressed for 1 Year
December 16th, 2013Via: The Atlantic: It cost $40 million to produce, documents serious wrongdoing, and doesn’t threaten national security. Team Obama won’t release it.
The Soviet Union’s $1 Billion ‘Psychotronic’ Arms Race with the U.S.
December 16th, 2013Via: Medium: During the Cold War, the US and the Soviet Union battled on many fronts to demonstrate their superior technical and scientific achievements. Some of these battles are well known and well documented, such as the race to put a human in space and then on the Moon. Others are much less well known. […]
U.S. Government Lobotomized 2,000 Veterans
December 16th, 2013Via: Army Times: The U.S. government lobotomized roughly 2,000 mentally ill veterans — and likely hundreds more — during and after World War II, according to a cache of forgotten memos, letters and government reports unearthed by The Wall Street Journal. “They got the notion they were going to come to give me a lobotomy,” […]
GOOGLE BUYS BOSTON DYNAMICS
December 14th, 2013😯 Via: New York Times: BigDog, Cheetah, WildCat and Atlas have joined Google’s growing robot menagerie. Google confirmed on Friday that it had completed the acquisition of Boston Dynamics, an engineering company that has designed mobile research robots for the Pentagon. The company, based in Waltham, Mass., has gained an international reputation for machines that […]
NASA Unveils ‘Valkyrie’ Robot for DARPA Competition
December 13th, 2013Via: IEEE Spectrum: Valkyrie (officially designated “R5” by NASA) is a 1.9 meter tall, 125 kilogram, 44 degree of freedom, battery-powered humanoid robot. A team from NASA’s JSC in Houston, in partnership with the University of Texas and Texas A&M and with funding from the state of Texas itself, built the robot for the DRC, […]
Air Strike Kills 15 Civilians in Yemen by Mistake
December 13th, 2013This is worth seeing: Via: Reuters: Fifteen people on their way to a wedding in Yemen were killed in an air strike after their party was mistaken for an al Qaeda convoy, local security officials said on Thursday. The officials did not identify the plane in the strike in central al-Bayda province, but tribal and […]
NSA Uses Google Cookies to Pinpoint Targets for Hacking
December 11th, 2013Via: Washington Post: The National Security Agency is secretly piggybacking on the tools that enable Internet advertisers to track consumers, using “cookies” and location data to pinpoint targets for government hacking and to bolster surveillance. The agency’s internal presentation slides, provided by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, show that when companies follow consumers on the […]
Birds Will Attack Amazon’s Delivery Drones
December 7th, 2013Amazon is just one potential operator. Once the rules are formalized in 2015, tens of thousands of organizations are going to be operating similar aircraft. Via: Slate: Birds already cause a lot of problems for other things in the airspace. The FAA has tracked more than 121,000 instances of bird-aircraft collisions since 1990. These are […]
Reagan Administration, CIA Complicit in DEA Agent’s Murder, Say Former Insiders
December 7th, 2013Via: Tico Times: Former DEA El Paso boss: Agent Camarena had discovered the arms-for-drugs operation run on behalf of the Contras, aided by U.S. officials in the National Security Council and the CIA, and threatened to blow the whistle on the covert operation. Two former U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration agents and a former U.S. Central […]
